Rubric for assessing Students in Oral English

Last year I gave Michiko a perfect 10 out of 10 for the first term’s work. She was delighted! This year I gave her an 8 after the first mid-term Poster Presentation. She was crushed! After class she approached me and she demanded to know how to get a 10 - in as much detail as possible – she even wanted it in writing. I was so impressed with her persistence that I thought about it for a week and just before the next class, it dawned on me; what a chance to throw it back at the girls and see what they thought a 10 should be…

So I put them in groups of 4, told the story of Michiko (while she smiled and whispered to her friend that she was the star of my story), and then told them that they could help me decide. We agreed to have two categories: 1) tests, and 2) class mark. We also decided to break it down from 10 down to 4 (they couldn’t imagine me giving anyone a 3 or less).

I worried that they might look at me and say, “Hey, that’s your job, Steve”, but I was genuinely impressed with how they got it together and produced a chart. I’m in the midst of collating their work now and plan to pass it out to all the high school students since I only do presentations now for testing.

I’d love to know if anyone out there has a similar descriptive breakdown of performance objectives in the form of a chart or “rubric”. Tonight’s post was inspired by Marco Polo’s most recent post on instructional objectives. Thanks, as always. 

My “soon to be” ER program

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

     

Building an Extensive Reading (ER) Library is a lot of work! I’ve been researching it and piloting it for about a year, and now as the new books finally begin to arrive, I hope to have it up and running as soon as the girls get back from summer vacation. There are many good people, papers and books describing how to get started, so I’ll just mention a few that got me going:

In Japan, Atsuko Takase has many years of ER experience and is tirelessly helpful. Rob Waring is also a wonderful resource person. I’ve used Marc Helgesen’s many practical articles. Julian Bamford and Richard Day wrote 2 very useful books and Akio Furukawa has a lot to offer through this Extensive Reading Website. The excel page of reading levels is wonderful. The other big webpages are the Extensive Reading Net and Rob Waring’s  ER Resources page. If that doesn’t keep you going for a while, nothing will.

Ideas that have worked well so far:

1200 Books to start – Oxford Reading Tree/Fireflies, Thomson Foundation Readers, Penguin Readers, Macmillan Readers, many Scholastic Readers, Longman Readers, Mr. Men/Little Miss series, I Can Read series, Frog and Toad series, etc.

Chu 1, 2, 3 - Reading ORT books to them, reading/looking at books as a treat at the end of class, relating the “fun” the high school girls are having with ER

Ko I, II, III – Doing 45 minute Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) to develop a reading habit. Measuring reading speeds (words per minute). Doing an Oral presentation (2 -3 minutes) of things learned from the ORT series as the Mid-term Test, i.e. character descriptions, story summaries, comparisons of their family/my family, cultural differences, and grammar points I noticed while reading (the best one so far was the self-satisfaction on Keiko’s face when she noticed the difference between What..? and “What a nice day!”). Challenging the girls to read 100 ORT books and write their own original Floppy/Kipper story (see pics).

Finally, just a few general comments from my students:

The Oxford Reading Tree (ORT) Floppy books are fun and interesting as starters to build confidence,

The Thomson Foundation Library Readers are the most popular because they are a little more mature than ORT,

Reading easy books is fun… much better than studying!

My comment:

“Rarely do I see everyone engaged in my regular Oral lessons. When I get 80% of the girls on track, I know I’m doing extremely well with both the topic and the appropriate level. So far with the ER lessons, I’ve consistently had over 95% of the girls engaged in reading, thinking and learning. It’s a joy to witness.”

Cheers for now,

Steve

Paul Potts

This guy kept me up too late last night. I wish I could better explain why it moved me and so many others…

The “underdog”, a “diamond in the rough”, “purity”? What do you think?

What a link!

Rather than E-mailing you all personally – right now – or calling you one at a time, I quickly realised that I have a blog to help in an emergency like this. A fellow Bhammer, Philip Brown, graciously shared the following link to a new journal

Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching which is jam-packed with meaningful stuff. If subsequent editions of the journal are as wickedly useful and interesting as this first free one, I’ll be busy downloading for a while. Needless to say the Paul Nation article is stellar: he takes the four strands from a vocabulary teaching approach and shows its underlying meaning for your entire well-balanced English program. You’ll be glad you read it!

Where to begin…again!

                               

Apologies to anyone who visited recently and thought I was a lazy bum…

Actually, I’ve been a very busy, lazy bum. I’ve also returned with a slew of great excuses for my apparent abandonment of this young blog:

1. I teach grades 7 – 12 (English Conversation and/or a Writing Course) in a girls’ high school in Osaka, Japan. This year I threw out all textbooks and have been swamped mentally and physically both deciding what to teach and getting ready to teach it.

2. I had laser eye surgery done in May (Kobe Clinic) and using the computer has been the only adjustment that is taking some time, so at night I’ve been avoiding the computer.

3. My good buddies (Kirsten and Mark) and I have been diligently researching the use of DICTOGLOSS in the Junior high school context for a chapter we’ve accepted to write in an upcoming teaching book.

4. Oh yeah… and that pesky little MA course that keeps asking me if I’ve forgotten about her and her 3 essays and a dissertation still to be written.

5. Finally, I’m not quite sure how to do anything on this blog and feel a little frustrated that I chose to move from blogger.

Amen.

Next post will be on the Extensive Reading library that I’ve started this year and the Open School lesson I taught last week. Just a quick pic to show you one of the results from the lesson.